OG and PE

One God and the Promotion of Education, Part One

By John Taylor; 2006 May 09

The passage from the Lawh-i-Maqsud bearing upon education is this:

"The Great Being saith: Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom." (Tablets, 161)

On the face of it, this can be taken as a cliché, a poetic way to state the obvious. Sure, everybody has talents and abilities and sure they are hidden. "You have got potential," the teacher tells you. Potential for what? That remains to be seen. Really, who knows? The teacher? The student? The school? Nobody knows. Yes, we go to school and work hard to bring buried abilities out, just like a mining operation. And yes, society supports education to make our potential into finished gems, which have value and are productive in the marketplace of human talent. But as always with a great creative mind there is a great deal more to this mandate of Baha'u'llah than meets the eye.

A mine is a planned operation, but at the same time it is fundamentally speculative. A dig may turn up nothing, or it may turn up something other than the gem sought. Even when it produces it may go dry at any time. The value of its gems, even on the ground, is still "inestimable," that is, the mining company cannot know the price of its commodity until it places it on the marketplace to be sold. The same thing is true of teaching. Schools are only as good as the knowledge they teach. If learning is based upon truth and reality, it will produce. Otherwise it is possible, indeed inevitable that teachers and students will teach and learn perpetually without doing good.

"Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth." (II Tim 3:7)

History is full of examples of teaching doing more harm than good, of building foundations upon sand rather than rock. Astronomers made elaborate models of cycles within epicycles to explain the motions of heavenly bodies around the earth, until the likes of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton dumped the whole elaborate mess into the trash by showing that earth and the planets revolve around the sun. Medicine obsessed for centuries on elaborate maps and techniques of bloodletting, until finally doctors rejected this hard won body of "knowledge" and addressed the truth, the actual, invisible causes of epidemic illness. In both cases the great improvement was not in doctrine; it was not so much the specific change in perspective that made the big difference. It was not, in astronomy, going from revolution around the earth to the earth revolving around the sun, or in medicine switching from gains and losses of humors in the blood to a new microbial theory of disease. Rather the true revolution involved a broader shift from reliance upon dogma, opinion and tradition to placing first observation of things as they are, and then fitting the form of understanding and action to that.

This is why I think Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" is so important, for it signals a similar shift in history from reliance upon tradition to full application of the scientific method. Mark the following well, fellow Baha'i scholars, for it could have been lifted from or -- better still -- made into a footnote to `Abdu'l-Baha's Secret of Divine Civilization.

"A historian who had lived at any time between 8500 B.C., until the rise of Greece and then Italy after 500 B.C., almost all major innovations in western Eurasia -- animal domestication, plant domestication, writing, metallurgy, wheels, states, and so on -- arose in or near the Fertile Crescent. Until the proliferation of water mills after about A.D. 900, Europe west or north of the Alps contributed nothing of significance to Old World technology or civilization; it was instead a recipient of developments from the eastern Mediterranean, the Fertile Crescent, and China. Even from A.D. 1000 to 1450 the flow of science and technology was predominantly into Europe from the Islamic societies stretching from India to North Africa, rather than vice versa. During those same centuries China led the world in technology, having launched itself on food production nearly as early as the Fertile Crescent did." (Guns, Germs and Steel, pp. 409-410)

In the wonderful epilogue to this book, "The future of Human History as a Science," Diamond goes on to point out that the secret of Europe's eventual success was what he calls its "disunity." A Baha'i, holding that word "unity" sacred, would prefer terms like "decentralized power" or perhaps "political diversity." While Europe was politically split up and Balkanized, it was unified in many important ways, by religion, by the use of Latin for learning, by common royal families, by traditions and history. What separated them mostly was the mountainous nature of their terrain, which China did not have. Even at the height of the Roman Empire, Diamond points out, only a small percentage of Europe's land mass came under its sway.

In any case, Diamond says to look at this fact of history: the abortive attempt of China to explore and eventually colonize the world. This happened just before Europe began its own successful world conquest. If China had finished what it started, our world would be very different now, clearly. Instead, one or two voyages were financed, then all naval projects were cancelled and the shipping yards that built the ships were dismantled. The explanation that I had been familiar with was this: the Chinese were arrogant. They did not believe that they could learn anything outside of their own wonderful civilization, so they sent out a few ships and then thought better of it and shut the project down.

Diamond offers a much more plausible alternative explanation. Columbus, like the mariners in China, met with failure in his proposal for a voyage of discovery. The difference was that China was "unified," it was a central government where "no" meant no. An innovator had no court of appeal. Europe, on the other hand featured dozens of rival governments. Columbus was refused almost a dozen times before he finally got a "yes" from Queen Isabella of Spain. Europeans were just as arrogant, just as capable of refusing wild-eyed schemes, but their geography split up and isolated its peoples into many separate governments. If one leader refused him he could go on to the next little kingdom. Once Spain's coffers were full of American gold, every other government in Europe had to respond by exploring and colonizing or see itself fall behind its neighbors.

Hence what Diamond using clinical terminology calls Europe's "chronic disunity" and China's "chronic unity." In Baha'i terms this would be a case of decentralization and over-centralization. What Baha'is are looking at has never happened before, the best of both extremes, unity in diversity. Once history becomes a science I think that historians will construct simulations of alternative histories, for example a world where China and Europe met and exchanged their respective knowledge, then colonized the world in a more human, lovey-dovey fashion, reaching out their hands in friendship to hunter gatherers everywhere.

In any case, this new way of looking at history set me to thinking about the Administrative Order of Baha'u'llah itself. One problem that has troubled me is how to reconcile the centralized power structure of the Assembly or House of Justice with the need for diversity. Each region has one Baha'i authority, there has been no hint of the chronically balkanized but creative melting pot of diversity that Europe was for the past several centuries. Even Christians in a city or even a small town like Dunnville have a variety of churches with various differences to choose from. If one congregation does not suit them, they can walk around the corner and go to a different one. Then it hit me, that is why the House has been fiddling with the structure of the Administrative Order over the past three decades. That is why cities are being broken into clusters and Ruhi sub-groups and so forth. All this is to gain entry by troops, yes, but ultimately to attain a decentralized diversity within the unity of the Administrative Order that will appeal to a broader cross section of society.

I have wandered off topic, haven't I? Well tomorrow I will try to bring us back to One God and Education.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com